Letter to the editor: State senator contends there's no room for compromise with gay marriage

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The Leavenworth Times - Leavenworth, KS

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Posted Jul. 3, 2014 at 3:22 PM

Posted Jul. 3, 2014 at 3:22 PM

Lansing, Leavenworth, Leavenworth County

To the editor:

Professor Ernest Evans is wrong in his column last Saturday. Marriage is not a matter of compromise or even a matter of definition. It is a matter of fact.

President Abraham Lincoln summed such things up in a short riddle: If you call a dog's tail a leg, then how many legs does the dog have? Four — you can call his tail whatever you want, it is not a leg.

Some things cannot be redefined into or out of being. They simply are. Marriage is between one man and one woman. And, it is beyond our power to change it — polls, rulings, laws, surveys, decrees, etc., notwithstanding.

People with same sex attraction deserve and must be given every right and courtesy due to anyone. They have the right to marry — one member of the opposite sex, just the same as anyone else.

That they love a member of their own sex does not change the nature of marriage.

Those who recognize marriage as a “holy estate established by God” and evidenced everywhere in history and in nature have been cast as everything except the realists they are. These people have rights, too, and yet they are forced in some jurisdictions to participate in and celebrate what they rightly see as a mock of the sacrament of marriage.

They do not want to tell anyone how to live their lives — they just want to be able to neither participate in nor celebrate the new orthodoxy that is being forced upon them. They are being denied their religious freedom in the name of tolerance.

The question before us is how tolerant will we be in Kansas with those who do not wish to be involved in homosexual marriage. I think

Professor Evans will find there is no room for compromise.

Your newspaper and others will misrepresent and defame such people and any efforts to protect their rights, as you have already done.